{"id":23999,"date":"2026-06-15T05:01:39","date_gmt":"2026-06-15T05:01:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/2026\/06\/15\/the-end-of-morality-foreign-policy\/"},"modified":"2026-06-15T05:01:39","modified_gmt":"2026-06-15T05:01:39","slug":"the-end-of-morality-foreign-policy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/2026\/06\/15\/the-end-of-morality-foreign-policy\/","title":{"rendered":"The End of Morality – Foreign Policy"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Essay: <\/span> The End of Morality <\/span>
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ALREADY AN FP SUBSCRIBER? through the motions<\/a>. When they violated international law, their lawyers produced lengthy<\/a> memos<\/a> explaining why, if you squinted just right, apparent violations weren\u2019t actual violations. When they invaded other sovereign states, they invoked<\/a> the U.N. Charter\u2019s right to self-defense. When civilians were killed, they expressed<\/a> regret<\/a> and pledged to investigate<\/a>. When they tortured detainees, they justified<\/a> it as \u201cenhanced interrogation techniques<\/a>.\u201d States frequently ignored international law, but they took pains not to dismiss it outright.
There was a time<\/span>\u2014not so very long ago\u2014when world leaders felt obliged to lie to us.
They didn\u2019t always lie convincingly, but they went through the motions<\/a>. When they violated international law, their lawyers produced lengthy<\/a> memos<\/a> explaining why, if you squinted just right, apparent violations weren\u2019t actual violations. When they invaded other sovereign states, they invoked<\/a> the U.N. Charter\u2019s right to self-defense. When civilians were killed, they expressed<\/a> regret<\/a> and pledged to investigate<\/a>. When they tortured detainees, they justified<\/a> it as \u201cenhanced interrogation techniques<\/a>.\u201d States frequently ignored international law, but they took pains not to dismiss it outright.
These days, major powers often dispense with the performance of adhering to international law altogether. In January, Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff for policy, distilled<\/a> the Trumpian view of the world: It\u2019s a world \u201cthat is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world.\u201d A few days later, President Donald Trump drove home the point: The only check on his power, he told<\/a> the New York Times<\/i>, was his own morality: \u201cIt\u2019s the only thing that can stop me. \u2026 I don\u2019t need international law.\u201d Meanwhile, in Russia, President Vladimir Putin declared<\/a> last year that \u201cno one is ready to play by rules set by someone far away\u201d\u2014certainly not Russia, when it comes to fulfilling<\/a> the Motherland\u2019s \u201cdestiny\u201d or completing<\/a> the task of \u201cgathering the Russian lands.\u201d Even China, usually more nuanced, has been abandoning the pretense that international law serves as a restraint. Reunification with Taiwan \u201ccannot be stopped by any force or anyone,\u201d President Xi Jinping declared<\/a> in 2019. Similarly, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs last year derided<\/a> an adverse decision by the Permanent Court of Arbitration as \u201cnothing but a piece of waste paper.\u201d <\/span>
The old vocabulary of international law, with its invocations of universal values, now sounds antique. For all intents and purposes, international law is dead. Like the proverbial chicken with its head cut off, international legal institutions continue their frenzied activity, but no one expects them to matter.
But if international law is dead, who killed it? Was it Putin in Ukraine, with his talk of Russian destiny? Or Xi in the South China Sea, with his artificial islands? Or was the killer Trump, with his tariffs, his threats, and his war on Iran?
A China Coast Guard ship fires a water cannon at a Philippine Navy chartered vessel, leaving four Filipinos with minor injuries, in the South China Sea on March 5, 2025.Ezra Acayan\/Getty Images<\/span>
In truth, the story of international law\u2019s demise looks less like a game of Clue than the plot of Agatha Christie\u2019s Murder on the Orient Express<\/i>: Everyone did it, and the victim mostly deserved it. It\u2019s tempting to pin the murder on Putin and Trump, but international law has been mortally wounded for decades\u2014and many who claimed to be its greatest supporters struck some of the most devastating blows. By the time Putin and Trump plunged in the final daggers, international law had become so riddled with internal contradictions that it had, in some sense, invited its fate.
Modern international law traces its roots to thinkers such as Hugo Grotius and Emer de Vattel, who envisioned natural law-derived rules governing war and sovereignty that would transcend kingdoms and faiths. As it matured, international law did at times function to restrain state violence, but just as often, it legitimized state violence, rationalized imperialist conquest<\/a>, and excluded colonized peoples from the \u201ccivilized<\/a>\u201d community it purported to govern.
After the Holocaust and the stunning carnage of two world wars, the international lawmaking enterprise acquired unprecedented urgency, idealism, and ambition. The U.N. Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the Geneva Conventions all represented, in effect, a wager that sovereign states would trade a degree of freedom for greater security and embrace a vision of a more just and equitable world.
And it worked\u2014almost. For a while. The second half of the 20th century saw a sharp decline<\/a> in interstate armed conflicts. After a period of Cold War paralysis, the events of the 1990s briefly seemed to vindicate that daring postwar wager: The U.N. Security Council authorized peacekeeping missions<\/a>, created international criminal tribunals<\/a> to hold officials accountable for genocide and war crimes, and launched ambitious efforts<\/a> to grapple with poverty, climate change, terrorism, and nuclear proliferation.
But the rapid expansion of international law and institutions had unintended consequences, supercharging the system\u2019s internal contradictions\u2014particularly the profound disconnect between international law\u2019s commitment to state sovereignty and its commitment to fundamental human rights. Taking sovereignty seriously meant states could not intervene in one another\u2019s internal affairs. Taking human rights seriously meant that such interventions might sometimes be required. As it evolved, the domain of international law became simultaneously vaster and less coherent, giving opportunistic actors ample room to exploit ambiguities and enforcement gaps while still gesturing toward compliance.<\/span>
A certain amount of hypocrisy became accepted as part of the system. The Cold War powers were prodigious hypocrites: The Soviet Union crushed workers\u2019 uprisings in Hungary while insisting it was liberating the working class; the United States devastated Vietnam while insisting it was defending freedom. When the Cold War ended, the hypocrisy accelerated. In 1999, NATO intervened militarily in Kosovo, then a semi-autonomous province of Serbia, on urgent humanitarian grounds<\/a>, although most commentators agreed there was no legal basis for the intervention inside another state\u2019s sovereign territory. The Independent International Commission on Kosovo later judged the intervention \u201cillegal but legitimate<\/a>\u201d\u2014but once legality and legitimacy were disaggregated, the door was left wide open for an ever-expanding number of \u201cextralegal\u201d moves.
In 2008, when Western powers\u2014despite prior diplomatic assurances that Serbia\u2019s territorial integrity would be respected\u2014recognized Kosovo as an independent state, Putin didn\u2019t let this bit of Western hypocrisy pass without comment. He called<\/a> it a \u201cterrible precedent, which will de facto blow apart the whole system of international relations.\u201d The Western states that recognized Kosovar independence had \u201cnot thought through the results\u201d of their actions, he warned: \u201cAt the end of the day, it is a two-ended stick, and the second end will come back and hit them in the face.\u201d He was looking forward to wielding that stick himself.
The United States ignored this, and the hypocrisy continued. The Bush administration responded to the 9\/11 attacks by weaponizing legal indeterminacy: Its lawyers argued that torture wasn\u2019t torture, indefinite detention was compatible with due process, and invading Iraq was consistent with the U.N. Charter. At the same time, human rights and humanitarian actors began to argue for a creative new understanding of sovereignty, arguing that the \u201cresponsibility to protect,\u201d or R2P, sometimes required states to intervene in the internal affairs of other states. Structurally, this argument paralleled<\/a> those made by apologists for the Bush administration. Officials asserted that if a state would or could not prevent its territory from becoming a staging ground for terrorists, other states had a right to use military force inside that state\u2019s borders to prevent those terrorists from exporting violence. Advocates for R2P argued<\/a> that if a state would or could not protect its own population from harm, other states had\u2014at least in extreme circumstances\u2014a right to use military force inside that state\u2019s borders to protect the population. <\/span>
The Obama administration repudiated many of its predecessor\u2019s legal positions but embraced much of its logic when it came to drone strikes and other targeted killings. The administration also embraced R2P, relying on the doctrine to urge the U.N. Security Council in 2011 to authorize<\/a> a humanitarian intervention in Libya\u2019s civil war. Russia\u2019s and China\u2019s abstentions during the Security Council vote were initially greeted by many as a positive<\/a> development<\/a> for international law. In retrospect, Putin was simply sharpening the two-ended stick\u2014and China was taking notes.
By 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea, Putin was ready to deploy the other end of the stick. He acknowledged<\/a> that the United States and other Western states \u201csay we are violating norms of international law\u201d by annexing part of Ukraine\u2019s sovereign territory but added: \u201cWhat exactly are we violating?\u201d The Kosovo precedent\u2014in which Western powers trampled on Serbian sovereignty by recognizing Kosovar independence\u2014was one \u201cour Western colleagues created with their own hands.\u201d Fast-forward to 2022: To justify Russia\u2019s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a still more blatant act of illegality, Putin again cited Western recognition of Kosovar independence to justify Russia\u2019s recognition of so-called breakaway republics from Ukraine\u2014and supplemented this by invoking<\/a> humanitarian intervention to protect Russian speakers and claiming preemptive self-defense against NATO expansion.<\/span>
China, meanwhile, was wrapping its baseless maritime claims in the South China Sea in the dense jargon of historical rights and administrative jurisdiction\u2014and responding to U.S. criticism by noting<\/a>, in 2016, that the United States is \u201calways selective \u2026 citing international law when it sees fit and discarding international law when it sees otherwise.\u201d
The hypocrisy endemic to the international legal order wasn\u2019t immediately fatal. In a system rife with unresolvable contradictions, some degree of hypocrisy arguably served as a necessary pressure release valve. And by taking the trouble to lie, hypocrites may paradoxically reinforce the power of the norms they are violating: As La Rochefoucauld famously observed<\/a>, \u201chypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue.\u201d <\/span>
A virtuous legal system can survive a certain amount of vice. What it cannot survive is the wholesale withdrawal of homage. When hypocrisy spreads too far, becoming the norm rather than the exception, the law ceases to be viewed as legitimate\u2014and when that happens, actors stop taking the trouble to be hypocritical. Call it the Tinkerbell Theory<\/a> of Law: When states no longer even pretend to believe in international law, it dies.
Vasily Nebenzya, Russia’s representative to the United Nations, speaks during a U.N. Security Council meeting on the Russia-Ukraine war at U.N. headquarters in New York on Nov. 20, 2025. Kena Betancur\/AFP via Getty Images<\/span>
So who killed international law? All the passengers on the International Express. The U.S. security state hollowed it out; liberal internationalists overextended it and generated a sovereigntist backlash, one with genuine democratic force. International lawyers spoke more to one another than to global publics. The Security Council immunized its permanent members. The global south, tired of an international legal system that encoded colonial hierarchy while preaching universalism, withheld the political support that might have saved it. Russia struck obvious blows, while China focused on patient subversion. And under Trump, the United States\u2014once the proudest supporter of the rules-based international order\u2014contemptuously rejects the idea of being bound by any law at all.
At the end of Murder on the Orient Express<\/i>, detective Hercule Poirot allows the multiple killers to go free. After all, the victim had it coming. And at least to some extent, the same could be said of the international legal order.
Still, it would be a mistake to celebrate its demise. As a domain for moral reasoning about politics, international law was always imperfect. But it gave us a shared language, a discursive terrain in which states understood they had to operate. However arbitrary or biased its rules, it offered a mechanism for resolving conflicts and reducing unpredictability in an otherwise anarchic world. The need to make arguments using the normative grammar of international law\u2014even insincere arguments\u2014constrained state behavior at the margins. International law offered focal points that reduced unpredictability, making states\u2019 behavior more legible and crises more containable.
The demise of international law isn\u2019t a moral loss; it\u2019s a structural catastrophe. And it comes at precisely the moment when the collective action problems we face urgently require the coordination mechanisms we are losing.
We may even come to miss the hypocrisy and the lies, for a reversion to the Hobbesian \u201cwarre of alle against alle<\/a>\u201d won\u2019t usher in a better or more honest global order\u2014just a more brutal one.
This article appears in the Summer 2026 print issue of Foreign Policy. Read more from the issue.<\/em>
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Rosa Brooks<\/strong><\/span> is a professor of law and policy at Georgetown Law and the author of Tangled Up in Blue: Policing the American City<\/i> and How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything<\/i>.<\/span> X: @brooks_rosa<\/a>
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